FREDDIE JONES

(12 September 1927 - 9 July 2019)

The celebrated British character actor Freddie Jones, who has died aged 91, was a late starter in the acting profession. For ten years he worked as a laboratory technician in a ceramics factory before switching from amateur dramatics to the professional stage. He obtained a scholarship to drama school and then acted at Lincoln rep before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962 for plays by David Rudkin, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Maxim Gorky and Shakespeare. Rarely a star in films or on TV, he nevertheless contributed a wealth of off-the-wall characters throughout his acting career.

He made his mark in Peter Brook’s RSC production of the Marat/Sade both on stage and on film in 1967. Before that he had launched his television career in Androcles and the Lion, Z Cars, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, etc, and later played Claudius in The Caesars among many other series. He had a small part in his first film, Joseph Losey’s Accident (1967). Next came John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd, The Bliss of Mrs Blossom with Shirley MacLaine, Otley with Tom Courtenay, and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed for Hammer. On stage in 1980 he created ‘Sir’ in Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser, his best defining part, based on Donald Wolfit. The film, however, went to Albert Finney.

Between his many TV appearances Freddie Jones also made films including Doctor in Trouble, The Man Who Haunted Himself, with Roger Moore, Kidnapped with Michael Caine, Antony and Cleopatra with Charlton Heston, Sitting Target with Oliver Reed, Son of Dracula with Harry Nilsson, The Satanic Rites of Dracula with Christopher Lee, Juggernaut with Richard Harris, Vampira with David Niven, and Zulu Dawn with Burt Lancaster. He made three films with David Lynch, The Elephant Man, Dune and Wild at Heart and, among many others, did Firefox with Clint Eastwood, Peter Yates’s Krull, Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On (Jones’s favourite), Firestarter with Drew Barrymore, Barry Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes, Bill Douglas’s Comrades, Giles Foster’s Consuming Passions, Terry Jones’s Erik the Viking, Timothy Forder’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (as Sapsea), Gabriel Axel’s Royal Deceit, Hugh Hudson’s My Life So Far, Spike Milligan’s Puckoon, Ladies in Lavender with Judi Dench and Maggie Smith and The Libertine with Johnny Depp.
Apart from his other television work, Freddie Jones played the cantankerous old Sandy Thomas in over six hundred episodes of Emmerdale from 2005 to 2018. He earned five Bafta nominations between 1965 and 1970 and won the title of ‘The World’s Best Television Actor of the Year’ at the Monte Carlo TV Festival in 1969. Freddie Jones was married to the actress Jennie Heslewood and they have three children, the actors Toby and Casper, and writer-director Rupert.

MICHAEL DARVELL